arXiv:2606.29203v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the Bayesian fixed-budget best-arm identification problem in which a learner can abstain from making a terminal recommendation. Subject to an abstention budget $\alpha$, we analyze the probability of undetected error--the risk of recommending a suboptimal arm without abstaining. Our central finding is that abstention induces a phase transition: without abstention, the error probability decays polynomially in the sampling budget $T$; in contrast, introducing any small positive abstention budget shifts this to an exponential decay. For Gau
Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.